What’s Happening: Immersive light art installations—marketing jargon for for-profit projection shows of late great artists’ work—are widely regarded as a scourge of the Instagram era. Can David Hockney transcend the gimmickry by captaining his own retrospective?

The Download: It’s hard to imagine David Hockney, of all people, putting a foot out of line in the eyes of the art-world establishment. Every few years, he tops auction charts for works by living artists. His body of work cultivates a utopic nostalgia that transcends place, time, and age. At 85 years old, he’s still practicing his craft. But this week, he incited pearl-clutching among London’s art critics with his latest display of work: an “immersive” projection installation of his paintings, digital art, and set designs.

The past few years have birthed a crop of animated warehouse showings of works by long-dead artists. With their work’s entry into the public domain, Frida Kahlo, Vincent Van Gogh, Salvador Dalí, and their household-name ilk make for low-cost, high-return, Instagram-ready spectacles of large-scale projection art, music, and plentiful selfie opportunities. They have all attracted widespread critical disdain, but the most damning indictment of the “immersive experience” is its inclusion in every snob’s favorite hate-watch: Emily in Paris.

Hockney seems to think his take on the immersive experience is poised to buck the soulless-selfie-factory trend. After all, he is the only living artist to lend creative direction to his own survey fantasia, “Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away),” on view at London’s Lightroom through June 4. In it, his works are projected to an orchestral score, with his own musings about his process and vision interspersed.

Teardowns from London press include “the kitsch is not just a twinkle but an overwhelming crescendo,” and two-star ratings from both the Evening Standard and the Guardian. Amid all the noise, though, Hockney seems unbothered. “My work was leading up to this, really,” he told the New York Times, where he also shared his hope for the show’s ability to draw in young artists and inspire them to see the potential of digital mediums.

The critical blowback for installations like “Bigger & Closer” is often pegged to the absence of a critical, curatorial eye, or the artwork itself being taken out of context. The subtext seems to be more an indictment of the ways young people are choosing to engage with art: instead of exuding pious reverence for art by looking up from their phones to take it in, they’re making technology part of their process. Perhaps it should come as little surprise that Hockney—himself an early adopter of technology in art—is more concerned with them than critics.

In Their Own Words: “I don’t care what critics say about me. I think it’s really good,” the artist told the Times, “and if I think it is, that’s all that counts.”

Surface Says: Kids dousing masterpieces in tomato soup is something to gripe about. Selfie “moments”? Meh.

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Join Surface and Blu Dot on Wednesday, March 8, to celebrate the award-winning furniture brand’s new Miami showroom. Guests are invited for an evening of music, cocktails, and light apps, as well as the opportunity to meet Blu Dot’s founders and peruse the new store.

Saadiyat Island, a cultural hub that’s home to the Louvre Abu Dhabi, is continuing to take shape. Its most recent attraction comes from Adjaye Associates, which recently unveiled the Abrahamic Family House, an interfaith complex containing a church, a synagogue, and a mosque serving the three Abrahamic religions. Each cubic-shaped house of worship is the same size but sports different design elements informed by their respective religions: the Moses Ben Maimon Synagogue has a facade formed by three layers of V-shaped columns that mimic the palm fronds found on Jewish sukkah huts, while the interior of the Imam Al-Tayeb Mosque features delicate latticework that creates the mashrabiya on a grand scale.

The three standalone buildings sit atop a one-story plinth that also houses a secular gathering space, a library, and exhibition areas known as the Forum, as well as an elevated communal garden that connects each house of worship. “I believe architecture should work to enshrine the kind of world we want to live in—a world of acceptance, openness, and constant advancement,” David Adjaye says. “Our hope is that through these buildings that celebrate three distinct religions, people of all faiths and from across society can learn and engage in a mission of peaceful coexistence for generations to come.”

Learning fabrication ropes alongside greats like Tony Delap, Enrique Martinez Celaya, and James Turrell in L.A.’s contemporary art sphere pushed Brian Thoreen to launch a furniture studio focused on crafting pieces intent on pushing material limits and garnering emotional reactions. He recently relocated to Mexico City and broadened his purview to encompass nonfunctional pieces of the same ilk, on display at the permanent home of MASA Galeria, the roving design gallery he founded with Héctor Esrawe and Age Salajõe.

Jackson Wiederhoeft recently bought a bible for the first time in 10 years. “There’s a lot of Greek and Catholic imagery in this collection,” he told Surface at New York Fashion Week. A powder blue, ankle-length shift dress paired with opera gloves recalls the style of Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis—save for the glittery tableau of Saint Sebastian (“a nod to the patron saint of the gays,” he says). “Dante wrote Paradiso and Purgatorio, but we’d all rather read Inferno. There’s something inherently human about wanting to know more about torture and the dark side. That’s where the romance lies."

Name: Jackson Wiederhoeft (@wiederhoeft_)

Describe this collection in three words: From another place.

Which look is your favorite? The light blue column dress with lingerie embroidered on it. That captures a lot of who I am: I want to be sexy, but I want to be comfortable and not show any skin. It has darkly humorous whimsy that people have come to associate with the brand, which is important. The Saint Sebastian dress is objectively violent, but on the back, there’s an embroidered tramp stamp that says “Kingdom Come.”

What was the inspiration? Humanity means being multiple things at once. Motifs like lingerie have connotations within a visual context. A lot of my work has to do with addressing those contexts, breaking them up, redoing them, and seeing what happens.

Attend any parties or events? My mom is here. We’re going to the Waverly Inn for a mommy-daughter dinner. I want to catch up with friends; I’m looking forward to circling back with my girls and celebrating.

Why did you choose to show in New York? What I do is so theatrical. The clothes live well in this space when people can experience a narrative performance. It’s a chance for people to see the clothes and get excited. I’m trying to make clothes, of course, but in turn also create a fantasy that people carry outside of this room.

Since establishing the Miami–based textile design studio, Art and Loom, founder Samantha Gallacher has developed a talent for blurring the boundary between art and carpets. Painterly motifs, irregular forms, patterns sourced from nature—her genre-bending creations color outside the lines of traditional rug-making. Art and Loom’s special-edition collections with artists such as Typoe and Jenna Krypell, as well as lighting design studio Avram Rusu, push further into new territory, particularly the mixing of materials.

Case in point: Gallacher’s latest collaboration with Fanae Aaron, the founder of decorative mirror studio Parts + Assembly, which brings together two interior design staples like never before.

Our weekly roundup of the internet’s most preposterous headlines, from the outrageous to the outright bizarre.

Man Facing Jail Over Theft of Almost 200,000 Cadbury Creme Eggs [The Guardian]

Shoes Carry Poop Bacteria Into NYC Buildings, Study Finds [Smithsonian]

Catalytic Converter Stolen from Famous Oscar Mayer Wienermobile in Las Vegas [USA Today]

A Dolphin Skull Was Found in Someone’s Luggage in Detroit [NPR]

Sperm Donor “Used Fake Names to Father More Than 60 Children” [Independent]

Popular Instagram Photographer Confesses That His Work Is AI-Generated [My Modern Met]

“She Really Wanted to See My Labia Piercing”: What Was It Like to Be Painted by Alice Neel? [The Guardian]

The way New Yorkers approach public space has shifted dramatically since the pandemic. Restaurants built dining sheds outside to survive, angering some cantankerous locals who view them as unsightly rat magnets. Office towers, once emblematic of the city’s economic dominance, still sit eerily deserted. In a city where every inch of space comes at a premium, issues of public space garner an impassioned response from locals, yet are saddled with bureaucracy—which may explain why the mayor appointed the city’s first chief public realm officer.

In the aftermath of these shifts, architects are grappling with the public realm’s newfound significance—and are tailoring their latest projects as such. Twelve examples are highlighted in “Architecture Now: New York, New Publics,” an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that explores how local firms are redrawing our relationship with metropolitan architecture. “Can this context catalyze the transformation of civic space and the public realm in New York?” asks Martino Stierli, who curated the exhibition alongside Evangelos Kotsioris and Paula Vilaplana de Miguel. “How can innovative architecture attempt to redress structural inequities and foster social transformation?”

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